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Overview

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller Octavia E. Butler’s bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred, now in graphic novel format. More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler’s mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century. Butler’s most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana’s own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him. Held up as an essential work in feminist, science-fiction, and fantasy genres, and a cornerstone of the Afrofuturism movement, there are over 500,000 copies of Kindred in print. The intersectionality of race, history, and the treatment of women addressed within the original work remain critical topics in contemporary dialogue, both in the classroom and in the public sphere. Frightening, compelling, and richly imagined, Kindred offers an unflinching look at our complicated social history, transformed by the graphic novel format into a visually stunning work for a new generation of readers.

Product Details

About the Author

Octavia Estelle Butler (1947–2006), often referred to as the “grand dame of science fiction,” was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947. She received an Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena City College, and also attended California State University in Los Angeles and the University of California, Los Angeles. Butler was the first science-fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship (“genius” grant). She won the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award and the Nebula and Hugo Awards, among others. John Jennings co-edited the Eisner Award–winning anthology The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. He is professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside and was awarded the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Damian Duffy, cartoonist, writer, and comics letterer, is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and a founder of Eye Trauma Studios (eyetrauma.net). His first published graphic novel, The Hole: Consumer Culture, created with artist John Jennings, was released by Front 40 Press in 2008. Along with Jennings, Duffy has curated several comics art shows, including Other Heroes: African American Comic Book Creators, Characters and Archetypes and Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics, and published the art book Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture. He has also published scholarly essays in comics form on curation, new media, diversity, and critical pedagogy.

Editorial Reviews

Awash in burnished ambers and potent violets, this illustrated adaptation of Butler’s 1979 time-traveling classic about a black woman from ’70s California suddenly transplanted to the 19th-century South amplifies the original’s visceral grace.

The Oprah Magazine O

Adapting any prose novel to the graphic format is an audacious undertaking at the best of times, but translating Octavia E. Butler's fearsomely powerful work in particular must surely have been a herculean task. Yet Damian Duffy and John Jennings have managed it with their version of Kindred…giving her most accessible novel…fresh life…Duffy and Jennings's adaptation retains the spare, almost baroque feel of Butler's narrative, down to its ominous chapter headings…The art here, which is angular and line-heavy and somehow apocalyptic, fits the weight of the material perfectly…The adaptation does not flinch from the ugliest parts of Butler's text. (Parents hoping that the graphical format may work better for teenagers, take warning.) A worthy and powerful supplement to a classic.

The New York Times Book Review - N. K. Jemisin

11/07/2016Dana, an African-American woman in the 1970s, is thrust backward in time to a 19th-century Maryland plantation. Over many visits to the past, she realizes that the spoiled son of the plantation owner is her ancestor, destined to father children with a slave, and she must protect his life to ensure her own existence. Butler’s celebrated 1979 novel, here adapted into a graphic novel, starts with a gripping idea and builds skillfully, as both Dana and her white husband in the present are warped by slavery and become complicit in its evil. This graphic novel recaps the classic source material faithfully without adding much to justify the adaptation, although it may find some new readers. The blocky artwork lacks the subtlety to evoke the complexity of the novel or the vividness of its historical settings (in addition to the antebellum South, the adaptation preserves the 1970s setting of the “present-day” sections). It’s an effective recap, clearly produced with great love and respect, but the book remains the gold standard. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"… Duffy and Jennings have risen to the challenge; their book highlights all of the medium's strengths while still respecting Butler's original words… It's a good introduction not only to Butler's body of work but also to the potential of the graphic-novel form.

Entertainment Weekly

"Adapting any prose novel to the graphic format is an audacious undertaking at the best of times, but translating Octavia E. Butler’s fearsomely powerful work in particular must surely have been a herculean task. Yet Damian Duffy and John Jennings have managed it…A worthy and powerful supplement to a classic.

The New York Times

"The heavily shaded, thick-lined, and rough edged art lends a grimness appropriate to a life of jagged brutality and fearful uncertainty. Both a rewarding way to reexperience the tale and an accessible way to discover it. "

Booklist

"Butler’s original novel is a powerful commentary on how the past informs the present and how we engage with both. But this adaptation makes an even more vivid statement about black Americans’ relationship with history. The kinetic lines feel urgent, messy, and visceral. The colors for scenes set in the present are muted while the colors of the past are vibrant, almost like a bright wake-up call to reality."

Slate

"Wonderful. Captures the essence of Octavia Butler’s vision even as it demonstrates the superlative skills of Duffy and Jennings."

"I do not lightly give anything a 5-star rating, but this is the best graphic adaptation of a full novel that I have ever encountered….the book belongs in every library and in the hands of any adult reader interested in serious graphic fiction.

ICv2

The timeliness of this release is important to note, as it revitalizes unresolved discussions around what it means to be a woman of color in America. Plus, the sense of frantic movement created by the artists’ colorful, layered outlines is a very cool touch.

IGN

"Kindred is a deeply intimate book filled with emotion, and portraying it visually only adds to that weight. Butler’s voice is much needed in the social and political climate right now, and Kindred’s mix of time travel and a historically accurate portrayal of racism is an incredible way to introduce her work to comics readers.

Paste Magazine

"The story lends itself well to the medium, which makes it easy for writers to contrast narration with dialogue… According to a 2015 survey of Comic-Con attendees, half of comic fans under 30 are women. In graphic novel format, Kindred provides a voice that can resonate with those readers."

"Kindred is a perfect candidate for the graphic-novel medium—Damian Duffy’s taut adaptation and John Jennings’s tense, electric renderings vibrate throughout, pacing and containing, then pushing every ounce of discomfort to the forefront. Comics and science fiction exploit their greatest shared strength by illuminating the mundane that surrounds us, allowing any reader to critique and process our world with new vision."

Eisner-Award winning and New York Times bestselling graphic novelist of March, The Year - Nate Powell

"This is an outstanding adaptation of a brilliant novel, and there's nothing more you could possibly ask for.

Boing Boing

"The book stays close to the original, with Duffy reproducing Butler’s matter-of-fact-to-the-point-of-bleakness prose, and Jennings turning in moody, expressive, woodcut-influenced illustrations that look hacked out of, or into, the past.

Flavorwire

If you’ve read Kindred this is a great companion. If you haven’t read it yet, this adaptation is strong enough to stand on its own."

Book Riot

"A glorious tribute to Octavia Butler’s masterpiece. Extraordinary."

Pulitzer Prize-winning author - Junot Díaz

While Kindred was released nearly 40 years ago, its exploration of black womanhood and afrofuturism proves to be as relevant today as it was then. And now, with the added imagery, the graphic novel certainly isn’t short on capturing the same sentiment as the original.“

Complex Magazine

"Together, Duffy and Jennings manage to condense Kindred into 240 pages that are respectful of Butler’s original work while also feeling like a distinctly new story at the same time. In exchange for some of Butler’s scene descriptions, the book offers up a richly rendered, raw take on Dana’s experience, heavy with thick lines and blurred movement conveying her existential disorientation."

Gizmodo

"Nearly four decades after its original printing, Kindred remains a valuable story and teaching tool. From its pages, we are reminded of the destructive consequences of prejudice."

"In its illustrated form, Kindred receives a new identity of sorts, while retaining all of the complexities, politics, and moral questions that propelled its author to literary icon status.

NPR’s Code Switch Blog

"Duffy’s words, coupled with Jennings’ brutally jagged, disorientating, gothic, and impactful art allows their adaptation to be two things: A graphic adaptation of a beloved novel, and an amplification of said novel. Reading them together illuminates Butler’s work from angles I never thought possible.

Nerds of Color

01/01/2018As adapted from Butler's iconic novel, Dana is unwillingly wrenched from 1976 back to 1815 and must blend into plantation life as the "slave" of her white husband, Kevin. Here, Dana meets the plantation owner's spoiled son, who rapes his slave-concubine Alice to produce Dana's own ancestors. Butler claimed that her novel sanitized life under slavery, but Dana witnesses and experiences miseries aplenty. Indeed, Dana and Kevin are both changed by the forced culture shock. The 1976 episodes appear in sedate two-toned images, the dystopian plantation society in jarring strong colors. (LJ 4/1/17)

Library Journal

★ 06/01/2017Gr 9 Up—A searing, painful, but necessary graphic novel adaptation of Butler's classic sci-fi work. It begins with a short glimpse at African American protagonist Dana's beaten physical state in the late 1970s and jumps briefly backward in time as she unpacks in her new home with her white husband Kevin. She is abruptly ripped from her present day to a plantation in antebellum Maryland, called there by the pained cries of her white ancestor Rufus. While Dana is in the past, time passes quickly, and she has to learn how to survive in horrendous conditions in order to protect her own future existence. She inexplicably returns to the present, where only a short time has passed, and eventually transports her husband to the past, where the white and black characters can't understand their interracial marriage. The couple continues to be torn apart by the sporadic time travel, and each time Dana hopes to reform Rufus as he grows older, but to no avail. The graphic scenes of violence, including intimations of rape, might shock readers, but they also serve to put history in stark and realistic light. Jennings's muted palette for the scenes in the 1970s and more vibrant hues in the mid-1800s serve as visual reminders of setting. The variation of the panels will catapult readers forward as the heroine slowly begins to understand how to manipulate the time travel. Inner monologues present Dana's own battles with complacency in a heartbreaking way. Strong language is appropriate for the horrific situations the characters find themselves in, and important themes of oppression, systemic racism and sexism, and survival are explored. VERDICT A compelling, masterly graphic novel for all libraries serving teens.—Shelley M. Diaz, School Library Journal

"Kindred is a perfect candidate for the graphic-novel medium--Damian Duffy's taut adaptation and John Jennings's tense, electric renderings vibrate throughout, pacing and containing, then pushing every ounce of discomfort to the forefront. Comics and science fiction exploit their greatest shared strength by illuminating the mundane that surrounds us, allowing any reader to critique and process our world with new vision."--Nate Powell "Eisner-Award winning and New York Times bestselling graphic novelist of March, The Year "

"Wonderful. Captures the essence of Octavia Butler's vision even as it demonstrates the superlative skills of Duffy and Jennings."--Nalo Hopkinson "author of Skin Folk, The New Moon's Arms, and Sisters Mine "